Fastbreak for Fathers

More and more dads are reaching out to one another via online resources and social networking sites. At Home Dads has always had a strong presence online but other dads are beginning to catch up. We have added a Face Book page to our outreach efforts – become a fan and help us develop a dialogue not currently possible on our website. We are just in the infancy stage compared to other sites. Ben Murphy has a ning site for his online magazine The Father Life - started by three guys busy with career and young families that were looking around for a good men’s magazine geared toward today’s fathers… to their surprise, they couldn’t find one! So, they started The Father Life.

In my opinion some of the best fatherwork to date is happening in the UK. Check out The Fatherhood Institute and Dad Info. Continuing in the British tradition of breaking new ground is Odadeo – a new website for dads that enables them to network online, and work out their own answers to the all-important question: “How am I going to be a great dad?”

Odadeo allows dads to make pledges in response to the question ‘How am I going to be a better dad?’ An example pledge is "I am going to read more stories" Odadeo creates a pledge page to help them fulfil their pledges. Check out the "I am going to read more stories" pledge page for an example. The site then helps men remember and keep their promises as a dad. Dads can ask the Odadeo community questions about their pledges. They can offer tips, links and answer questions themselves. Whenever they make progress on their pledges, they ‘pip’ it, Odadeo then keeps track of how they are doing on their pledges. Dads can then get a personalised DADSDAQ graph, showing how they’re doing.

Other Odadeo features:

It’s a social network, so dads can make friends with other dads

They can find out what other dads like them are pledging, and join them

Dads can blog about their kids on Odadeo

They can add ‘badges’, to connect to other dads for example, if they add the ‘new’, ‘geek’ and ‘young’ badges, they will find the other new dads, geek dads and young dads on the site

Dads can add photos of themselves and their kids, with complete privacy and security for the photos (unlike most other online photo websites)